Tag Archives: Ads

You’re looking at what Moroch, a Dallas-based advertising agency, cooked up for McDonald’s in October of last year. We… don’t know what the campaign was, when or where they were used, but these gloves are a brilliant idea if you ask us. Granted they may end up making you want to bite your fingers off, but that’s a risk we’d totally be willing to take.

No you can’t buy them, at least not yet, and we suspect you might get a lawyerly letter if you tried to market these yourself without permission. But… that wouldn’t stop grandma from making you a personal pair, now, would it? Not that we’re encouraging trademark infringement, but once an idea is set free, it’s hard to put it back in the box.

With a little bit of imagination and creativity, advertising agencies can often take a dull message (“Hey! New point-and-shoot camera!”) and come up with an angle that makes the product stand out. Take the above Van Gogh self-portrait… It’s an ad by the agency Leo Burnett Switzerland for Samsung’s new “NX mini [camera] with a 3-inch flip-up display and interchangeable wide-aperture lens”, and features three iconic self-portraits, re-imagined as if they’d been made by taking a selfie. It thus tries to elevate the banal act of taking a selfie into something more grandiose, implying that this camera will somehow make them more special. Yeah… nice try. A selfie is a selfie and the ad won’t make us want to buy a dedicated point-and-shoot that doesn’t do much more than what our phones can do. But… it’s still a nice try. Gotta give credit where it’s due. So hit the jump for two more of these ads.

There’s nothing left to do with the bottle once all the beer is gone…or is there? Russian design studio Heads and Hands came up with a fun and unusual way to reward those who drink Grolsch beer by incorporating a movie unlocker right onto the bottle. After taking the final swig, beer drinkers can tap the empty bottle onto their phone, tablet, or laptop and enjoy a movie on the house (or is it, on the beer?)

The whole thing is possible thanks to iBeacon bluetooth technology and the Movie Unlocker app. A beacon is actually hidden under the Grolsch beer cap, which sends out a bluetooth signal to the device that in turn connects to the server to unlock the movie.

Every day, people look at their reflections on the mirror and mentally list down everything that’s wrong with their faces. Their pores. Their eyes. Their skin. Their hair. Their eyebrows. Their nose. The picture-perfect mugs of celebrities and models in magazines certainly don’t help any. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that most of them look like that thanks to PhotoShop. Sure, there are a lot of natural beauties out there, but most images that appear in print media are retouched in one way or another.

Highlighting the features of the image-editing software in a tongue-in-cheek manner is artist and photographer Anna Hill with her series of parody PhotoShop ads called “Beauty is Only Pixel Deep.”

At first glance, these logos might not seem like much. You’ve probably already seen them thousands of times already, whether you just skipped over them while grocery shopping or actually use them on a daily basis. But if you take a closer look, then you’ll see why these logos are not your ordinary hand-drawn or computer-rendered logos: they were made using the actual products they represent.

They’re part of a street art series called “Pro Bono Logos” by artist Dorota Pankowska. Armed with bottles of Cheez Whiz, jars of Maxwell House, and tubes of Colgate, Dorota took to the streets and recreated the logos by smearing cheese spread and coffee grounds on otherwise clean walls.

So you found the perfect spot to take a photo as a souvenir from your much-deserved vacation. You could use a tripod, ask some passerby to take your photo, or use the clever public camera stand instead. Unfortunately, the latter is only available in select locations, but hey, at least it’s another option.

These public camera stands are built by Sunpole, a Japan-based manufacturer of flagpoles and other outdoor products. The stand pictured above was spotted at a scenic area in Enoshima Island in Japan. It’s basically a tall structure with a small platform at the top, with a notch off to one side to hold your camera.… Continue Reading

This Douwe Egberts coffee machine looks like a typical machine, but you’ll soon realize that not everything is at seems when you take a closer look. It doesn’t have the usual slots where you’re supposed to push your coins or paper bills in, but it’s equipped with a facial recognition system instead. Don’t expect to get a cup of coffee if you’re fully awake and perky, because the machine has been programmed to only dole out free cups of Joe to people who are yawning (or in the process of yawning.)

The international coffee company chose to install the unusual coffee machine in the busy O.R. Tambo International Airport in South Africa, where over 210 cups of coffee were given away to tired and weary travelers.

This fur coat is definitely unusual. In fact, some might find it downright disgusting, as it’s definitely not what it might appear to be. What you think is the fur is actually hair–hair from the chests of living, breathing men. If you’re wondering why someone would create an abomination a coat like this, then wonder no more: it’s part of an ad campaign by dairy company Arla.

They commissioned for the creation of the fur coat, which took designers over 200 hours to weave and put together millions of strands of hair, to promote the launch of Wing-co, which is their new milk drink that’s made for men.

This ad has been floating around for about a week, but in case you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s a fun, lighthearted attempt by Microsoft to point out the iPad’s shortcomings. And it’s right on point. It’s reminiscent of Apple’s award-winning “I’m a Mac” ads in accuracy, yet different in its delivery. We’re not completely sold on a Surface yet, but that’s mostly because we haven’t gotten past seeing tablets as much more than entertainment consumption devices, rather than productivity machines. But maybe it’s time that changed, and the below ad sure has us thinking.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.